This disclosure relates generally to social networking systems, and more specifically to combining information in user profiles maintained by various social networking systems.
A social networking system allows its users to connect to and communicate with other social networking system users. Users may create profiles on a social networking system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information, and share this information with other social networking system users by posting content on the social networking system or otherwise allowing other users to access this information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Because of the increasing popularity of social networking systems and the increasing amount of user-specific information maintained by social networking systems, a social networking system provides an ideal forum for advertisers to increase awareness about products or services by presenting advertisements to social networking system users. The increasing amount of user-specific information maintained by social networking systems also allows advertisers to gather information about users' characteristics to more effectively target advertisements to social networking system users, subject to privacy settings of social networking system users.
Users of a social networking system often post content to the social networking system for presentation to other social networking system users, allowing the other users to interact with the posted content. Based on interactions by a user with content posted other users, the social networking system may determine characteristics of the user, such as the user's interest in other users or types of content. The social networking system may use characteristics of a user to select content, such as advertisements, for the user to increase the likelihood of interacting with content that the social networking system presents to the user.
Conventionally, a social networking system presents content to a user based on information associated with the user by social networking system. For example, the social networking system selects content for presentation to a user based on demographic information in a user profile associated with the user, actions performed by the user and captured by the social networking system, connections between the user and other users of the social networking system, or other suitable information. However, users of a social networking system are often users of additional social networking systems and provide different or additional demographic information or perform different actions when interacting with an additional social networking system. Hence, information associated with a user by a single social networking system may incompletely reflect characteristics of the user.